Lane was looking at her, and he bobbed his head. "I don't know how much money you got, but'"

Cruz spoke slowly, as though they were stupid: "We-don't- have-enough-people. We don't have enough! Is that hard to understand?"

Cohn said, "We don't have enough if we have a mob scene."

She stared at him for a minute, then said, "What's the option?"

"We have to get on top of them. We kill one: we never give them a chance to resist. We pop one the minute we've got them, let them look at the body and think about being dead. I can hold them myself, that way. Even if we get twenty or thirty people. Jesse does the boxes, Lindy is the desk clerk, you're on the radios."

Cruz said, "No," and Lindy said, "I can't do that," but Cohn, ignoring Lindy, said, "Rosie, just think about it."

Cruz went back to her bedroom, which had a tiny bathroom with a tight shower, and got cleaned up and let the water run over her head, and shampooed and conditioned and didn't think about it, until she was toweling off.

She'd killed three people in her life, after some long consideration, and with great care. Before this benighted trip to the Twin Cities, five others had been killed in the series of robberies she'd done with Cohn and his gang. None of the killings had been cold. All had been necessary, and in some way, self-defense, with the exception of the two cops killed in New York. Spitzer had simply gotten nervous and pulled his trigger, and Spitzer had paid.

Now the body count was out of control. Four dead in the Twin Cities, counting McCall. Another in the hotel would be five.

But the cops had her photo, Laura was out of the Venice place, she thought, and the fire should already be cleaning up after them. She could change her face a bit, go blond ' but she had to be far gone. Someplace like New Zealand, she thought. Some careful money, checks coming in from Ireland, a full-time straight job for a while '

Laura was still clean.

Five dead, best case. Hard to think about.

But Cohn had put his finger squarely on one critical fact: if they went in shooting, they could do it with three.

A cold front was headed down from Canada, and this might be the last day of summer: but it was another good one, a good day for shorts. Don Johnson, the perverted mailman, wearing shorts and a wrinkled blue shirt, climbed out of his truck with a bag on his shoulder and started up the suburban driveway, his second block of the morning.

Letty and Carey were in a Channel Three van driven by a tough nut named Andy Cramer, who Letty had thought was an Australian but turned out to be a South African. Cramer wedged the van into the curb in front of the postal truck and hopped out, slid back the side door and picked up his camera, and Carey took the microphone and they walked up the driveway behind Johnson, who looked back at them, and then at the house, wondering what was going on. Letty sat in the open door of the van and watched: Carey had said she wouldn't do it if Letty got involved.

"Mr. Johnson!" Carey called. "Mr. Johnson."

Johnson was befuddled. "Me?"

Cramer said, for Johnson's benefit, "We're running," and Carey shoved the microphone at Johnson's face. "Mr. Johnson, we've been told by a sixteen-year-old girl that you have repeatedly forced yourself on her sexually."

"What-what-what?" Johnson held a handful of mail between his face and the camera lens. He was horrified and, Carey was pleased to see, frightened. Guilty-guilty-guilty.

Carey: "She tells us that she can identify your intimate areas by a variety of birthmarks and also by a bite mark she left on your hip, which left a scar, when you were forcing her to perform oral sex on you."

"Get away, get away…" Johnson tried to run around them and Cramer tracked him with the camera, stayed with him.

"Do you deny this, Mr. Johnson? Are you willing to speak to the police about these charges?"

"Get away, get away," Johnson shouted. "This is the mail, I'm delivering the U.s. mail here…" A few letters slipped out of his hand and he slapped at them, trying to catch them.

Carey bored in: "Did you force this girl to perform oral sex?"

"I did no such thing…"

"Did you force the bathroom door, naked, while she was in the shower and press your body against hers?"

"No-no-no…"

"… Get into her bed naked after forcing the bedroom door?"

"No-no…" Johnson was trying to get back to his truck, but Cramer blocked him and growled, "Don't touch the camera, mate."

Carey put the knife in: "Are you going back to her house, Mr. Johnson? Are you going to continue seeing this girl's mother?"

"No, no, no…"

Carey turned to Cramer and said, "Turn off the camera."

He dropped the lens toward the ground and Carey put her face close to Johnson's, and he flinched away, a line of sweat on his upper lip, and she said, "We're friends of Juliet. And we're really from Channel Three. If you go back to see Juliet's mother, if you ever talk to Juliet again, we'll put this tape on the evening news, I swear to God."

Cramer said, in a working-class British accent, "You heard the phrase, tossing the salad?"

Johnson drew back from Carey. "Maybe."

"You're gonna be the designated salad-tosser at Stillwater state correctional institution if you go back on Juliet," Cramer said. "When you get out, if you get out, you're gonna have to walk up and down every neighborhood you'll ever live in, and knock on the doors and tell the people you're a registered pervert. Keep that in mind." He reached out with his free hand and pinched one of Johnson's nipples, hard.

Johnson squealed, "Ah," and jerked back.

"And I'll pinch your other nipple," Cramer said. "If you get out."

They retreated to the van. Cramer put the camera inside and they slid the doors shut, and left Johnson standing in the driveway, in a puddle of dropped political advertisements.

Letty said, "Harsh." But she was smiling.

"If the station ever finds out what we did, we might get fired," Carey said.

"You forgot to mention that," Cramer said, but he didn't seem worried.

"You would have come anyway," Carey said. To Letty: "So Juliet's good-she's got a place to stay."

Letty asked Cramer, "What was that thing about a salad?"

But when Letty called Briar, the other girl began sobbing. "I'm at the hospital. I've been at the hospital all night. Randy got hurt."

"How?"

"Some asshole threw him in front of a car," Briar said. "He got run over."

The image in Letty's mind almost made her laugh, but she pushed the impulse away and asked, "How bad? Are you okay?"

"I'm okay…" and Briar unraveled the whole story, starting with their failure to track down a methamphetamine salesman, on to the purchase of a pint of rum, Randy and Ranch getting loaded, the decision to stop at the cafe in St. Paul, still hoping to find George, the crank salesman, the argument, and the fight.

"So ' this guy was sort of protecting you, right?" Letty asked. "Randy was threatening to beat you up, and this guy threw Randy in front of a car?"

"Well, I didn't need that, I didn't ask him for that, Randy wasn't' Randy's really hurt, Letty. He's all bruised, you should see it, and his foot's broken. I can't go home now. Who'd take care of him? He can't even cook."

"Juliet-I've got to talk to you," Letty said. "Is there someplace to eat there, at the hospital?"

"The cafeteria…"

"Which hospital?"

"Regions. I can see the Capitol out the window."

"We're going to come there. I'll meet you in the cafeteria in half an hour," Letty said.